They believe they have gotten rid of the chaff, and only the pure remain, or that the fact that the Church has nearly ceased to exist in certain areas means that it has triumphantly merged with secular culture.
Maybe. I'd like to think it is something other than self-delusion and cowardice, but I'm cynical about these things.
k omalley wrote:
M.M. believed that JPII, as a very holy man of constant prayer has heard from God, and knows he is reigning over the end of Catholicism as we know it, not the end of the Church, mind you.
Have any of you read Malachi Martin? Do you give his theory any credence?
His more melodramatic stuff (Satanic rituals in the Chapel of Sts. Peter and Paul, etc) is questionable, but it isn't really important in the context of his work. His basic argument is that many members of the clergy, and especially people in high bureacratic positions in Rome, are 1.) no longer Catholics, 2.) actively evil in a way that your lapsed friends who never go to Mass except on Christmas and Easter are not, 3.) are networked with each other, and 4.) want to change the Church so profoundly as to destroy her in all but name.
Each of those items hardly requires proof at this point, IMAO. 1 and 2 and 4 flow directly from the process that even Paul VI (God have mercy on him) went so far as to call "auto-demolition". 3 is clearly observable in both the fact that they win so often and that others have such a hard time standing up and fighting back; look at the scale of the damage and the time frame it was inflicted in and then ask yourself if that was the result of isolated actions. Also, consider in this light the influence that the USCCB and it's ilk wield, despite the fact that the only body of bishops established by the Lord and possessing sacramentally granted authority is the whole College of bishops united with the Pope. They ain't a Parliament, and Christ did not hand down Robert's Rules of Order as a guidebook for governing His Church.
I'd like to believe that JPII has been told by God the Father (or whomever) that he should just mind the store because it's all going to come crashing down regardless of what he does. I like JPII personally and have no doubts regarding the absolute sanctity of his personal life. He may well shine as a white martyr in the age to come (or maybe as a confessor, since we don't really know who got whatshisname to take that shot at him).
All I can say for sure is that if I were Pope, I would help push the teetering building over. The Curia, the College of Cardinals, etc. can come and go, for good or ill, but they ain't the Church. The Church is the whole body of Catholics united with the Pope through their clergy. The Modernists need to keep the human structures to win, while driving out the maximum possible degree of actual Church-ness (pardon that barbarism) from them; the infrastructure is the very prize they are at war for, since it can be twisted to serve their ends while the Church, per se, cannot. But we don't need the infrastructure to win, we just need the Church - which can't be destroyed anyway. In other words, we can win RIGHT NOW by destroying what they need but we don't need. It's the infrastructure and it's value, which is real but limited, that they use to bait us and make us think we need to play these games (conveniently, they wrote the rules to those games; how odd!). If we were willing to go back to the catacombs for a generation or two we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
Rome just doesn't have the courage.
It's ironic - Luther turned the Church into a "spiritual" (i.e. notional and metaphorical) community, and that was heresy. The Church is a real living organization. Now, five centuries later, we have the opposite ecclesiological heresy, that tries to turn the Church into nothing but it's most material and human facets - as if Jesus established a flowchat outlining a bureacracy rather than a living society of saints. It's like Docetism and Arianism rolled into ecclesiology; first Satan got people to deny the humanity and then Divinity of the personal Christ, and now he is getting people to deny the divinity of the Mystical Body of Christ after he got someone else (the "Reformers") to deny it's humanity.
the infrastructure is the very prize they are at war for
When some famous feminist flake (I think it was Rosemary Reuther) was asked years ago why she continued to teach in a "patriarchal" university, she said, "because that's where the Xerox machines are." In other words, she could just do what she wanted and use the infrastructure for her own purposes.